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Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Thanks to a recent initiative by Library of Congress and National Park Service staff, the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog has grown by nearly 400,000 records. Through a bit of technical wizardry, there is now a record for each digital image in one of our cornerstone collections: the Historic American Buildings Survey/ Historic American Engineering …
Posted in: Architecture, Drawings, HABS/HAER/HALS, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Can you take a photograph of a ghost? Will a spirit pose for your camera? Looking at “spirit photographs” from the mid-1800s to early-1900s, you might be tempted to answer, “Yes”! Claims of capturing a spirit with the camera lens were made as early as the 1850s, when photography was relatively new to the world. …
Posted in: Photographs, Posters
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
When working with historical photo collections, it always pays to ask yourself: Does the title match the content? The original photographers sometimes mixed up dates and places, or misspelled words and omitted key info — just like you or I might. Glancing at this pair of photographs, they seem to show the same scene. But …
Posted in: Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Catch the man – and the woman – behind the camera in a set of photographs recently added to the Library of Congress Flickr photostream. Drawn from multiple collections and ranging from the mid-1800s to the modern day, the Photographer in the Picture set shows photographers at work, sometimes catching them only in shadow or …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
The Picture This blog invites you to share our love of pictures and the stories they can tell. You’ll see special images that caught our eye and also learn about entire collections as we explore the vast holdings of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress—more than 14.5 million photos, posters, cartoons, …
Posted in: Photographs